www proxy - sometimes shows IP, sometimes shows PC name

Apr 23 08 9:04 pm

What's controlling this? I'm sure that yesterday, it was showing the name of the PC I was testing Wingate www proxy with but today, it's displaying the IP address.

Cheers, Rob.

Apr 23 08 9:41 pm

There's a few variables here as WinGate will try to obtain the client computer name from multiple sources.

1. DHCP client. If the IP was issued by DHCP then we use the recorded name against that IP. There's been a bug in DHCP that could possibly cause issues here

2. lookup in our known table of names::IP. This table is populated by:
a) periodic network enumeration if enabled
b) spying on UDP/137 broadcasts (node registrations etc).
Personal firewalls on client computers can prevent this from working.

3. Reverse DNS lookup. This may work fine in an AD environment, but normally people don't forward WinGate DNS to the AD DNS server.

If WinGate was not able to obtain a computers name by any of the above methods, the computers IP is shown instead.